Did They Drink Blue Lotus at the Festival of Drunkenness?

The question

If you have read about Egypt’s Festival of Drunkenness, you have probably seen it linked to Blue Lotus. The flower steeped in wine, drunk in honour of the goddess, the ceremonial drink of the rite.

It is a beautiful picture. I wanted to know how much of it the temples actually show.

The festival itself, the myth of the raging goddess turned back by drink and the excavated porch of drunkenness at the temple of Mut in Karnak, I have described in the article on Hathor at Dendera. This article asks one narrower question. Where is the lotus in the evidence for this rite, and what is she doing there?

The drink the myth actually names

The story is told in a text called the Book of the Heavenly Cow. The sun god Ra has beer brewed with a red mineral so that it looks like blood, and has it poured out at dawn for the goddess who is destroying humanity. She drinks, and turns back.

Then Ra does something important. He establishes the preparation of that drink at the goddess’s yearly feasts.

The drink has an Egyptian name, and the great Berlin dictionary of the Egyptian language glosses it, on the strength of this text, as a sleeping or intoxicating draught. It is Egypt’s one named ceremonial intoxicant. And what is added to it is a mineral.

There is no lotus in the myth’s drink.

A festival with a date

The festival was real, and it was on the calendar.

At the Euergetes Gate at Karnak, an inscription says that Ra instituted the goddess’s feast of drunkenness on the twentieth day of the first month of the flood season. The historian Mu-chou Poo, in his 1995 study of wine in ancient Egypt, records a festival of the drunkenness of Hathor at Dendera on the twentieth of Thoth, which is the same day, and calls the myth “the traditional explanation for the origin of the festival of Hathor and for the use of intoxicating drinks in the celebration.”

The Place of Drunkenness

This is where the flower enters, and she enters as architecture.

At Medamud, the temple of the god Montu near Luxor, an inscription published by the French Egyptologist Étienne Drioton names a part of the building “the Place of Drunkenness”, and describes it as the place “where one walked through the water-thickets”.

Drioton notes what the room looked like. Its columns imitated giant papyrus, and its walls carried a band of water plants.

So there was a room named for drunkenness, built to look like a marsh, in which people walked among the reeds and water plants of a painted and carved river.

Nobody drinks a lotus in that inscription. The water plants are the room. The drunkenness is the room’s name. But it is the closest the evidence comes to the flower, the drink and the rite sharing one physical space, and it is a building, not a metaphor.

Dancers above the lotuses

The same temple gives us the dance.

One inscription at Medamud calls the goddess Raet-Tawy “queen of the dance and princess of drunkenness”.

Another reads “her dancers are masters of drunkenness”, and Drioton records that this line runs directly above a band of carved lotuses.

And in a third scene the god Bes, the dwarf god of music and dance, is shown dancing with a bouquet of lotus in each hand. The carving does not say which water lily he holds.

Text and image, one above the other. It would be easy to say the dancers drank the lotuses below them. The wall does not say that, and so neither will I. What it shows is that the flower belonged to the scene of the rite, right beside the dance and the drunkenness.

The lotus that writes the word

Here is the detail I find most extraordinary.

At Philae, an inscription names the goddess Tefnut “at the seat of drunkenness”. In the hieroglyphs, the word for drunkenness is written with the sign of an open lotus flower.

For a while I believed this was one scribe’s private choice, found only there. It is not. Dieter Kurth’s grammar of Ptolemaic Egyptian, published in 2007, notes that blossom signs of this kind serve as determinatives, the silent signs that tell a reader what kind of word they are looking at, for two word families: joy, and drunkenness. He gives examples from Deir el-Shelwit, from the birth house at Dendera and from Edfu.

So in the temple writing of Ptolemaic Egypt, the lotus could mark the very words for rejoicing and for being drunk.

Why is not settled. It may be the flower’s connection with festival joy, or a play on words, or something about the way she opens. The texts do not say.

And one tempting conclusion does not follow. There is an Egyptian plant whose name means roughly the plant of drunkenness. Its written form carries a generic plant sign, not a lotus, and what plant it was remains unknown. The lotus writes the word. That does not make her the plant.

The laudanum that was not opium

One more piece, because it circulates widely.

In a public lecture about the festival, the Egyptologist Betsy Bryan mentions that “laudanum” was used in the drink for Hathor at Dendera. To a modern ear that word means opium.

In Egyptological usage it almost certainly means ladanum, the fragrant resin of the rockrose, Cistus, a standard ingredient of ancient perfumery. It is not opium. Bryan herself says in that lecture that she does not know the source plant, and that the word is attested only in Ptolemaic texts. Her printed, peer-reviewed chapter on the festival names beer and wine.

The printed chapter is the one to rely on.

What the evidence says

So, did they drink Blue Lotus at the Festival of Drunkenness?

No surviving text says so. The myth names beer with a red mineral in it. The printed scholarship names beer and wine.

But the flower is everywhere around the rite. She is in the walls of the room called the Place of Drunkenness. She is carved beneath the line that calls the dancers masters of drunkenness. She is in the hands of the dancing god. She is even inside the writing of the word itself.

Whether she was also in the cup is a question the evidence leaves open. The pattern of her appearing beside wine and ointment is strong, and I have set out how far it goes in the article on the evidence for Blue Lotus in Egyptian ritual and in the article on Blue Lotus and wine. But there is no surviving recipe, and I would rather hand you that real gap than a smooth story.

For the whole picture of the flower in Egypt, start with the complete guide to Blue Lotus.

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